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LUXITBV AND THK FINK ARTS, — IN S05IE OF THEIK MOliAI. AND 
HISTORICAL RELATIONS. 



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ADDRESS 



DELIVERED IN AID OF THE FUND FOR 



BALI/S EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF WASHINGTON. 



13 MAY, 1859. 



ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 



BOSTON: 
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY. 



M DCCC LI.V. 



AN 



ADDRESS 

DELIVERED AT THE MUSIC HALL, BOSTON, 

IN AID OF THE 

FUND FOR BALL'S EQUESTRIAN STATUE 
OF WASHINGTON, 



EVENING OF 13 MAY, 1859, 



/ 

BY 



ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 



H 






BOSTON: 
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY. 



M DCCC LIX. 



.vfj/vVv 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by 

Little, Brown and Company, 

In the Clerli's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts 



RIVERSIDE, Cambridge: 

PRINTED BY H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



INTRODUCTION. 



The following Address was first delivered in Baltimore, on the 
evening of 2d of May, 1859, in aid of the Funds of the Young 
Men's Christian Association of that city. It is here published, by 
request, as delivered at the Music Hall in Boston, on the l<3th of 
May following, in aid of an object for which it had been previously 
promised. 

On this latter occasion, after a chorus by the " Orpheus Glee 
Club," whicli had kindly volunteered for the purpose, the object of 
the Address was introduced as follows, by the Hon. Alexander 
H. Rice, as Chairman of a Committee, appointed by the Artists of 
Boston, to procure funds for casting in bronze the design of Mr. 
Thomas Ball for an Equestrian Statue of Washington : — 

Ladies and Gentlemen : — 

I have been requested by the committee who have in charge the 
erection of Ball's equestrian statue of Washington in the city of 
Boston, to introduce the subject and the orator of the evening. 
And remembering that those who read books commonly skip the 
preface, especially if it be long, in their eagerness to reach the in- 
terest of the following volume, I shall a^iply the warning to the 
present occasion, and hope to secure your patience for the prepara- 
tory w^ord by postponing for a moment only the intellectual banquet 
for which we are already impatient. I shall therefore perform my 
whole duty if I but sound the homely note of preparation, and hint 
at the object to be attained, leaving all the poetry of the theme to 
the same eloquent lips whose inauguration of other monuments and 
statues, of marble or imperishable bronze, has likewise adorned the 
literature of our country with contributions equally beautiful and 
permanent. [Applause.] Nothing more strikingly indicates the 



progress of taste and the maturity of general intelligence, than the 
interest which is beginning to be exhibited in the multiplication of 
objects belonging to the department of the Fine Arts. Specimens of 
these will indeed always be found among the appendages of wealth 
and luxury ; but they become peculiarly significant, when, obedient 
to the voice of the people, Art, in her noblest forms, joins hand in 
hand with History to bear the examples of human greatness down 
the pathway of time. Viewed in the light of local interest only, it 
was eminently fitting that the first popular statue erected in Boston 
should be that of her own native and illustrious son, the Printer- 
philosopher, Franklin. And perha[)s it is equally proper that the 
second should be that of the great forensic genius of New England, 
who made this state and city his chosen home, and whose public 
career is so intimately associated with their social and political 
history. But viewed even in this light, or in any light, what other 
name can be mentioned for this honor before his, who, living was 
declared to be " first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts 
of his countrymen ; " and to whose memory Death gave an im- 
mortal consecration of fame and aflfection. [Applause.] 

The merit of initiating the present enterprise belongs to the 
artists of Boston, who, besides fulfilling the dictates of patriotism, 
embrace in their purposes a fraternal tribute to the genius and 
worth of a distinguished member of their own profession. And 
as it may be concluded that we have fairly reached the period when 
commemorative art in this country shall be in general requisition, 
it is also proposed that this statue shall exhibit the resources of our 
own State in the production of works of its class. The artist is a 
citizen of Boston ; the statue will be modelled here ; it will also 
be cast in bronze at some one of the foundries of Massachusetts, and 
it is expected that abundant funds for defraying its cost will flow 
from the generosity of our own people. The general supervision 
of the work has been given to a committee appointed by the artists 
themselves ; but it is the desire of all concerned therein to secure, 
as far as practicable, the cooperation of the public in such manner 
as may be agreeable to the varying tastes of individuals. The 
committee, however, take the present opportunity to state that it 
is proposed to hold a Fair some time in October next, on a scale of 



liberality, if possible, never excelled in this city, the proceeds of 
which will be devoted to this object. And they take pleasure, also, 
in saying that the ladies, always the admirers of genius and heroism, 
and who are only less than omnipotent in their undertakings, have 
already engaged in this service with an enthusiasm which ensures 
success. [Applause.] 

It has always been the source of honest pride to her people that 
in the catalogue of patriotic Statcis, Massachusetts has held an hon- 
orable position, and it is a continued gratification in our time to feel 
that wlien the record of those who have manifested their venera- 
tion of the peerless Washington sh dl be gathered, it will be among 
her durable honors that her sons and daughters, among them, him 
whom, preeminent in the service, it is needless to name, have been 
earnest in securing to posterity the unaltered home of the Father of 
his country. [Applause.] 

Here also again, in the capitol of the State, surrounded by the 
ancient military landmarks, which neither the lapse of time nor the 
hand of improvement has quite obliterated, within the sound of ar- 
tillery from the spot where the Commander-in-chief first drew his 
sword in the presence of the continental army, will a new memorial 
rise to perpetuate his fame. And among the cheering auspices of 
the undertaking, I find not the least to be the privilege of announc- 
ing to you as one of its earliest supporters and advocates, the orator 
of this evening; another honored son of Massachusetts, whose ears 
I may not oftend with the language of personal compliment, and 
whose public services and private virtues supersede an introduction 
to this audience of his fellow citizens — the Honorable Robert 

C. WlNTIIROP. 



M 



ADDRESS. 



I WAS not at all surprised, my friends, on my return 
home yesterday from a brief Southern tour, to find that 
the wars and rumors of wars from abroad, which are 
agitating" and engrossing the public mind, and the ele- 
mental revolutions at home, which precipitated us into 
midsummer a few days since only to plunge us back again 
so soon into this cold and cheerless spring, should have 
somewhat overclouded the prospects and the promise of 
this occasion. 

But the glorious sunshine which we have enjoyed this 
afternoon, the inspiring strains of this charming band of 
choristers, and still more the eloquent and excellent re- 
marks of my valued friend who has just introduced me 
so kindly, bave dissipated all doubts and forebodings, and 
have assured me that the cause which I am to plead is 
already safe, and that we shall none of us have occasion 
to repent that we have " set this Ball in motion." — My 
only apprehension is, that the occasion may hardly seem 
to call for so grave and formal a discourse, as that which, 
according to my promise, I now proceed to deliver. 

It would not be easy, I think, to name a more interest- 



8 

iiig or a more instructive memorial of our Revolutionary 
period, than the " Journal of a Voyage to England," — 
with the account of what he saw and heard and did there 
in the years 177^ ^"^^ ^17^-> — % that eminent and elo- 
quent young Boston patriot, — Josiah Quincy, Jr, — who 
died, alas, within sight of his native shores on his return 
home, just eighty-four years ago on the 26th of April 
last, leaving a name which, even had no fresh renown 
been earned for it in a later generation, could not foil to 
have been held in the most grateful remembrance, through 
all ages of our country's history, by every friend of Amer- 
ican liberty. 

This journal will be found in the admirable Memoir of 
its author, prepared and published in the year 1825, by 
his early distinguished and now venerable and venerated 
son. The Memoir has long been out of print, and copies 
of it are not always easily to be procured. But it well 
deserves a place in every American library, and it is 
greatly to be hoped that a new edition of it may be forth- 
coming at no distant day from the same filial hand ; — 
a hand still untrembling under the ceaseless industry of 
more than fourscore years, and never weary of doing 
another, and still another, labor of love for his kinsfolk, 
his fellow-citizens, or his country. 

One of the most striking passages of this journal is 
that which describes an interview between our young 
Boston Cicero, as Quincy was deservedly called in those 
days, and that distinguished member of Parliament and 
friend of America, Col. Bar re. 

Among the statesmen of the mother country, during 
the early part of our Revolutionary contentions, the name 



9 

of no one was more familiar or more endeared to our 
American patriots than that of Isaac Barre. A self- 
made man, of lunnble Irish jjarentag'e, he had served 
upon this continent, as an officer of the British army, 
before the oppression of the colonies which led to their 
separation had commenced. He was with Wolfe, as an 
aid-de-camp, at the capture of Quebec, where he received 
a wound which was destined to cost him his eyesight be- 
fore he died. Some of you may, perhaps, remember a 
pleasant anecdote, whi<:h Mr. Webster used to tell with 
the highest relish, when he was himself suffering- from an 
almost blinding' catarrh during the season of roses or 
of hay, — the story of Lord North, who was afflicted 
with total blindness before his death, saying- of Col. Barre, 
after he also had become blind, — "Although the worthy 
gentleman and I have often been at variance, there are 
few men living who would feel more delighted to see each 
other." Barre returned home, however, to become adju- 
tant-general, governor of Stirling Castle, and a member 
of the House of Commons. In this latter capacity he 
signalized himself, withiu two days after taking his seat, 
by a bold and blunt philippic upon no less formidable and 
illustrious an opponent than William Pitt, the great Earl 
of Chatham ; and not long afterwards he was among the 
few members of parliament wlio ventured to resist the 
passage of the Stamp Act, making a powerfid and admi- 
rable reply on that occasion to the celebrated Charles 
Townsend, the most eloquent of all the advocates of that 
ill-starr'd, — if I ought not rather to call it, in view of all 
its fortunate consequences, — that auspicious and glorious 
measure. '* There has been nothing of note in Parlia- 



10 

ment, (writes Horace Walpole on the 12th of February, 
176.5,) but one slight day on the American Taxes, — 
which Charles Townsend supporting, received a pretty 
heavy thump from Barre. who is the present Pitt, and 
the dread of all the vociferous Norths and Rigbys, on 
whose lungs depended so much of Mr. Grenville's power." 
This is the speech which has become so familiar to the 
declamation of the schools, and which will readily be re- 
membered by those striking- exclamations and replies, — 
" They planted by your care ! No, your oppressions 
planted them in America ! They nourished up by your 
indulgence ! They grew by your neglect of them ! They 
protected by your arms ! They have nobly taken up 
arms in your defence ! " 

Barre was also the first to foretell distinctly the residt 
of the oppressive measures which he was so bold in 
opposing. " I prophesied on the passing of the Stamp 
Act in 1765, (said he just four years after wards, j what 
would happen thereon ; and now in March, 17^9, I fear 
I can prophesy further troubles, — that if the whole peo- 
ple are made desperate, finding no remedy from Parlia- 
ment, the whole continent will be in arms immediately, 
and perhaps these provinces lost to England forever." 
So signal, indeed, had been his efforts, on repeated occa- 
sions, in favor of the rigiits and privileges of the Colo- 
nies, that the people of Boston, at a town meeting in 
1765, — at which James Otis presided and Samuel Adams 
was present and took part in the proceedings, — not only 
voted an address of thanks to Col. Barre and Gen. Con- 
way, but ordered that the portraits of both those gentle- 
men, as soon as they could be procured, should be sus- 



11 

pciidt'd in Fanciiil Hall, " as a staiuliiig momiiiu'iit to all 
posterity of the virtue and justice of our l)enefactors, and 
a lasting" proof of onr own gratitude. " That was aniong" 
the earliest formal and puhlic applications of the Fine 
Arts to historical monuments in our New England annals. 
And the order was duly and honorahly executed. At the 
Boston town meeting of May 8, 17675 only a few days 
more than ninety-two years ago, a letter was directed to 
he written to Col. Barre. announcing that his picture had 
heen received and placed iu Faneuil Hall. That of Gen. 
Conway was also procured ahout the same time ; hut I 
am sorry to add that hoth these portraits, together with 
others, perhaps, of even greater artistic value, disappeared 
during the occup.-mcy of the town hy the British army in 
l'J'J5—6, hoth of them having heeu either destroyed or 
carried away. 

Barre is said to have heen the first person who gave to 
oiu- Boston rehels the cherished title of ' Sons of Liberty.' 
And, as an evidence of the estimation in wliich he uas 
held in Massachusetts as late as 177^5 I ^^^^J remind you 
that a noble agricultural town in the heart of the Com- 
monwealth was called by his name, which it still bears ; 
the odious name of liutchinson having been repudiated 
to make way for it. And though Col. Barre did not 
contimie to sustain our cause, — as he could hardly have 
been expected to do, — after we were once at open war 
with bis own land ; although he was even l)etrayed into 
a vote for that abominable measure, the Boston Port 
Bdl ; I cannot help thinking that it would still be a most 
agreeable souvenir of those early services to American 
liberty, if the completion of a full century from the date 



12 

when it was first placed tliere, should find that same por- 
trait of him, (hy Sir Joshua Reynolds I dare say,) if it 
could anyhow be recovered, once more hanging on the 
walls of old Faneuil Hall, side by side with that of 
Quincy himself, which ought certainly to be there, also. 
There will be time enough, however, for Boston folUs, 
who are proverbially full of notions, to think about this, 
between now and the 8th of May, 1867. Meanwhile, 
having refreshed your memories with a brief account of 
the career and character of this young Irish friend of 
American freedom, let me turn to the interview between 
him and our patriot Quincy, as described in the journal 
to which I have already referred. 

That interview took place on the 2d day of Janu- 
ary, lyT-^i ''^^ Bath, well known, at that period and since, 
as one of the most fashionable watering-places of England, 
and it is thus introduced by the spirited young journalist : 
— " January 2d. Was visited by Hon. Mr. Temj)le, who 
spent an hour with me. Went again over Bath, in order 
to review the buildings. Spent the afternoon with Mrs. 
Macaulay,^ and went in the evening to a ball at the new 
rooms, which was full and very splendid. The rooms 
are very elegant, and the paintings which cover the win- 
dows, — taken from the draughts of the figures found at 
the ruins of Herculaneum, — have a fine effect. This 
evening, (he adds,j I had two hours' conversation with 
Col. Barre, and from him I learned that lie was once the 

1 She was the accomplished lady whose History of England was hardly 
less celebrated in those days than that of her distinguished namesake in 
these, having been pronounced both by Horace Walpole and by the poet 
Gray, as " the most sensible, unailected, and best liistory of England 
that we have had yet," although Hume's had been published long before. 



13 

IVieiid ol i\li". I Ititclmison in (tj)j)()sitl<>ii to Gov. Powimll, 
but that lie had for a h)i)i>- time, and es})ecial]y since his 
last arrival in I'^noland, ^\■holIy deserted him." 

In tlie course of this conversation, Col. Barre made 
the following remarks : " Abont fifteen years ago, 1 
was through a consideraI)le j)art of your country; — for in 
the ex])e<lition against Canada, my business called me 
to pass by land through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, 
New York, and Albany. When I returned to this 
country, I was often sj)eaking of America, and could 
not help speaking well of its climate, soil, and inhabi- 
tants ; — for you nnist know. Sir, America was always a 
favorite with me ; — but will you believe it. Sir, — yet I 
assure yon it is true, — more than two thirds of this 
island at that time, thought the Americans were ne- 
groes ! " — " I replied," says Quincy, " that 1 did not in 
the least doubt of it, — for that if I was to judge by the 
late acts of Parliament, I should su|)pose that a majority 
of the peoj)le of Great Britain still thought so ; — for I 
found that their representiitives still treated them as 
such." " He smiled, (continues the Jouinal,) and the dis- 
course dro])ped ; " but Quincy cpiietly adds, as an intima- 
tion that the point of his own reply had not been nn])er- 
ceived, — "Col. Barre w^as among those who voted for the 
Boston Port Bill." 

Few things could more strikingly illustrate the igno- 
rance which prevailed in the mother country, at that 
critical j)eriod, in regard to those Colonies which she was 
so blindly and madly goading on to rebellion, than this 
little dialogue ; — but interesting as it is in itself, and 
instructive as it would be to dwell upon it longer, it is 



14 

not tlie part of the interview between Barre and Qiiincy 
which I have taken as the text and topic of this Address, 
and to which I now hasten to proceed, without further 
preamble. 

"Col. Barre," says Quincy, while we were viewing the 
j)ictures taken from the ruins found at Herculaneum, 
said, " I hope you have not the books containing' the 
draughts of those ruins with you." I replied, "There was 
one set, I believed, in the public library at our College." 
" Keep them there," said he, " and they may be of some 
service as a matter of curiosity for the speculative, but 
let them get abroad and you are ruined. 'Tis taste that 
ruins whole kingdoms ; 'tis taste that depoj)ulates whole 
nations ; I could not help weeping when I surveyed the 
ruins of Rome. All the remains of Roman grandeur 
are of works which were finished when Rome and the 
sj)irit of Rome were no more, — unless I except the 
ruins of the Emilian baths. Air. Quincy, let your 
countrymen beware of taste in their building's, equipage, 
and dress, as a deadly poison." 

If this solemn and emphatic warning, to which the 
youthfid Quincy seems to have made no reply, but which 
he considered worthy of being recorded at length in his 
private diary, — a warning which some of us, perhaps, 
might be almost invidious enough to intimate had been 
literally interpreted and practically followed from that day 
to this, so very little of anything worthy of being called 
taste has yet been exhibited among us ; — if this solemn 
and emphatic warning had come from some sober moral- 
ist, or some grave minister of the Gospel, it might have 
been regarded only as an amplification oi" paraphrase of 



15 

one of those general injunctions against vanity and woild- 
liness which ahoimd on the pages of Holy Writ, and we 
should have listened to it, or read it, as we read or listen 
to that memorable text, for example, of one of the Epistles 
of St. Jolni — •' For all that is in the world, the Inst of the 
flesh, and the Inst of the eye, and the j)ride of life, is not 
of the Father but is of the world. And the world 
passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the 
will of God abideth forever." But here was an experi- 
enced and eidightened Statesman, in the maturity of his 
parliamentary renown, whose vigor of intellect and force 
of character and felicity of style have ranked him among 
the few by whom even the brilliant and mysterious Let- 
ters of Junius might have been written, and to whom 
those letters have sometimes been ascribed, — a man who 
liad seen the world, and was deeply read in the history of 
the world, and had no distaste for the pomps and vanities 
of the world, — a lover of Liberty, too, and an earnest 
sympathizer with Young America in that cause of free- 
dom, for which she was girding herself so heroically to 
contend even unto the death ; — and it was from the lips 
of this man, in no spirit of religious bigotry or of moral 
primness and punctiliousness, but on broad, philosophical, 
and political grounds, that the warning has come down 
to us against cultivating and indulging a taste — an ex- 
travagant and licentious taste — not merely for equipage 
and furniture and dress, but for buildings and sculpture 
and the Fine Arts. 

Such a warning, I need hardly say, was not original 
with Col. Barre. So far at least as it may be construed 
into a protest against luxury in general, as unworthy of 



16 



being- countenanced by a free and enlightened people, and 
as leading to the decay and downfall of Liberty, it may 
be found on the pages of a thousand historians and 
poets and moralists of every age and land. Gibbon, 
indeed, who had gazed on the remains of the Eterual 
City with an agitation not less vivid than his parliamen- 
tary compeer, — for Gibbon once sat in the House of 
Commons by the side of Col. Barre, — Gibbon, who 
traced the original idea of his great " History of the 
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire " to the emotions 
excited by a company of barefooted friars singing ves- 
pers in the temple of Jupiter, while he sat musing amidst 
the ruins of the Capitol, — Gibbon appears to have found 
some compensation for the evils of this sort of extrava- 
gance in the suggestion, that " in the present imperfect 
condition of society, luxury, though it may proceed from 
vice and folly, seems to be the only means that can cor- 
rect the unequal distribution of j)roj)erty." Hume, too, 
with the ingenuity and acuteness which characterize so 
many of Iiis celebrated Essays, draws a careful distinction 
between those luxurious indidgences which "are pursued 
at the expense of some virtue, as liberality or charity," 
and those which " entrench upon no virtue, leaving an 
ample surplus whence to provide for friends, family, and 
every proper object of generosity or compassion ; " and he 
would seem to imply, that from this latter sort of indul- 
gence there was no danger to be apprehended either to 
individuals or to nations. And Dr. Johnson, in a spirit 
of combative dissent from those who conversed with him, 
and with a singularity which can hardly be reconciled 
with his ordinary good sense, — while he expressed a 



17 

strong and strange contempt for evervthing like orna- 
mental architecture, and severely ridiculed and satirized 
sculpture in particular, vet declared with more than his 
ordinarv doorniatism to Sir Adam Ferg-uson. who had 
suggested that luxury corrupts a people and destroys the 
spirit of lihertv. — •' Sir, that is all visionary ; " — adding 
emphaticallv. in a conversation with Goldsmith, on an- 
other occasion afterwards. — " No nation \vas ever hurt hy 
luxury." But Goldsmith himself, however he may have 
been silenced and confounded for the moment, was, as we 
all know, bv no means convinced by the dogmatic mor- 
alist ; and no one has left a more earnest and unequivocal 
testimony on the sul»ject. than may be found in those 
well-remembered and exquisite lines of the '• Deserted 
Villag-e " : — • 

" Ye friends to truth, ye Statesmen, wlio surTey 
The rich man's joys increase, the poor's decay, 
'Tis yours to judge how wide the limits stand 
Between a splendid and a happy land. 
Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore, 
And shouting Folly hails them from her shore ; 
Hoards e'en beyond the miser's wish abound, 
And rich men flock from all the world around. 
Yet count our gains. This wealth is but a name 
That leaves our useful product still the same. 
Xot so the loss. The man of wealth and pride 
Takes up a space that many poor supply'd ; 
Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds. 
Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds : 
The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth 
Has robb'd the neighb'ring fields of half their growth: 
His seat, where solitary sports are seen, 
Indignant spurns the cottage from the green ; 
Around the world each needful product flies, 
For all the luxuries the world supplies ; — 



18 

While thus the land, adorn'd for pleasures all, 
In barren splendour feebly waits the fall. 

As some fair female, unadorn'd and plain, 
Secure to please while youth confirms her reign. 
Slights every borrowVl charm that dress supplies, 
Nor shares with art the triumph of her eyes ; — 
But when those charms are past, for charms are frail, 
When time advances, and when lovers fail. 
She then shines forth, solicitous to bless. 
In all the glaring impotence of dress ; — 
Thus fares the land, by luxury betray'd. 
In Nature's simplest charms at first array'd ; 
But verging to decline, its splendours rise, 
Its vistas strike, its palaces surprise ; 
While, scourg'd by famine, from the smiling land 
The mournful peasant leads his humble band; 
And while he sinks, without one arm to save. 
The country blooms — a garden and a grave ! " 

And nearly eighteen hundred years before Goldsmith, 
the inimitable satirist of antiquity (Juvenal) had con- 
densed the whole idea into two noble lines, for which our 
circumlocutory language can supply no adequate transla- 
tion, — when he represented and personified Luxury, more 
ruthless than War itself, brooding over Rome, revelling 
in her streets, and wreaking a relentless vengeance for a 
conquered world : — 

" Sffivior armis, 
Luxuria incubuit, victumque ulciscitur orbem." 

But there is something in the time, place, and circum- 
stances of the dialogue between Quincy and Barre, which 
give it a peculiar impressiveness for every American 
heart, — imparting to it an interest far different from any, 
and far deej)er than any, which could be inspired by the 
most brilliant flights and figures of mere poetry, whether 
ancient or modern, and challenging for it the gravest and 



19 

most serious con si deration. And at tliis |)recise moment 
of our history, especially, when Lnxury has made such 
unmistakahle inroads npon the old simplicities of our in- 
door and of onr out-door life ; when its flauntino- mani- 
festations confront us at every corner of the streets of our 
large cities, and even of some of our smaller towns and 
villages ; when Vice and Crime, and political degeneracy, 
and personal profligacy, too, in so many fearful forms, 
seem to he following and accompanying its track ; and 
when, at length, a sweeping financial crisis has so recently 
summoned us all to a reluctant pause in our career of 
profuse and reckless expenditure ; at this precise mo- 
ment of our history, it may he wholesome as well as in- 
teresting to ponder a little upon so remarkahle an utter- 
ance, — accepting and laying to heart so much of it as is 
just and reasonable, and not omitting, at the same time, 
to recognize such discriminations and distinctions, as may 
spare us from being called on to proscribe all encourage- 
ment and patronage of the Fine Arts, as incompatil)le 
with the purity of our social life, and dangerous to the 
security of our Republican Liberty. 

I do not propose, in pursuing this subject on the pres- 
ent occasion, my friends, to occupy any considerable part 
of my time in trite severities or easy sarcasms upon the 
])articular manifestations which have marked the advances 
of luxury in oin' country of late years. There have 
been attacks enough, certainly, and more than enough, 
upon our sister sex, for the costly material or the swell- 
ing proportions of modern female costume. I shall enter 
into no criticisms upon their laces and jewelry, their 
basques and bodices, their cashmeres or crinoline, their 



20 

gossamer expansions " or jiatent adjustables " ; — nor will I 
even venture upon the discussion whether a better bal- 
ance might not be strucl< in tlie book of beauty, if a httle 
less of whatever material they may wear should be em- 
ployed in encumbering the lower half of their forms, and 
a little more in covering the u|)per half. Talleyrand 
once wittily said of W'Omen's dress in his own time 
and land, that " it began too late and ended too soon." 
The latter fault has certainly disappeared at the behest of 
modern milliners, and our streets and crossing stones are 
daily and hourly swept by many more than those \Adio are 
hired to keep them clean. There is, after all, nothing 
new in the fashions and follies of modern female attire, 
and nothing new can be said about them. Milton por 
trayed them all in that memorable description of the 
treacherous wife of Samson, as he introduced her to the 
chorus of the Danites in his magnificent drama of The 
Agonistes, and one might almost imagine that he was 
prefiguring the advent of some Broadway or Washington 
Street or Beacon Street belle of the present day : — 

" But who is this, what thing of sea or laud ? 
Female of sex it seems, 
That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay. 
Comes this way sailing 
Like a stately ship 
Of Tarsus, bound for the isles 
Of Javan or Gadire, 
With all her bravery on, and tackle trim. 
Sails filled, and streamers waving. 
Courted by all the winds that hold them play. — 
An amber scent of odorous perfume 
Her har'binger, a damsel train behind ; 
Some rich Philistian matron she may seem. 
And now at nearer view, no other certain 
Than Dalila thy wife." 



2] 

And even the idea, wliieli is so much harped on of hite, 
tliat \\-ouian is res])onsihle for (hainino- the country of its 
vveahh, and rcihhino- {h)niestic industry of its riglitful re- 
muneration, hy iiKhilging- so inorihnatelv in foreign fash- 
ions and imported Hnery, is ahnost as ohl as the Christian 
era. It was in the year of our Lord 2-2, a great ancient 
historian informs us, that luxury had reached such a 
])itch in Rome, that the ^diles complained to the Senate, 
and the Senate laid the snhject before the Emperor Tibe- 
rius, and called for his special and sovereign intervention. 
It was before Tiberius had indulged in those corrupting 
excesses at Caj)reH^ which have associated his name with 
eternal infamy, and while he was still '• addicted (as the 
historian tells us) to tlie frugality of ancient manners." 
Tlie Emperor addressed a special and serious communi- 
cation to the Senate on the subject, which gives us an 
edifying insight into the fashions of those days : — 

" If a reform is in truth intended," says he, " where 
must it begin I and how am I to restore the simplicity of 
ancient times? Must I abridge your villas, those vast 
domains, where whole tracts of land are laid out for orna- 
ment ? Must I retrench the number of slaves, so great 
at present, that every ftimily seems a nation in itself? 
What shall be said of massy heaps of gold and silver ! of 
statues wrought in brass, and an infinite collection of pic- 
tures, all indeed highly finished, the perfection of art ! — ■ 
How shall we reform the taste for dress, which, according 
to the reigning fashion, is so exquisitely nice, that the sexes 
are scarce distinguished 1 How are we to deal wath the 
pecidiar articles of female vanity, and, in particular, with 
that rage for jewels and precious trinkets, vjliich drains 



2^2 

the Empire of its wealth, and sends, in exchange for haw- 
hles, the money of the Commomoealth to foreign nations, 
and even to the enemies of Rome?" — He concludes by 
the prudent an;l excellent suggestion, that sumptuary laws 
will not answer the purpose, that each individual must be 
a law unto himself, that men of rank must be restrained 
by principle, the poor by indigence, and the rich, .if in no 
other way, by satiety. The whole subject was accord- 
ingly dismissed for the time, and the Roman ladies con- 
tinued to wear what they pleased.* 

And so, doubtless, will the American ladies continue 
to wear what they please, in spite of any reproaches or 
ridicule, any gibes or sneers, which may be cast upon 
them from any source. Yet American ladies are as 
open to the appeals of reason, of justice, and of patriotism, 
as those who aspire to be considered as their rightful lords 
and masters. Let them once be convinced that the cause 
of virtue, of good morals, and of freedom, demands of 
them any sacrifice of show or of substance, any abate- 
ment of expenditure, any abandonment of display, any 
self-denial or self-devotion whatever, and they will be the 
last to shrink from such an appeal. If any one doubts 
this, let him recall the sacrifices of our Pilorim Mothers 
and of our Patriot Mothers, as recorded on the pages of 
our Colonial and Revolutionary history. Let him read 
afresh the story of that noble North Carolina landlady, 
Mrs. Elizabeth Steele, who, as Irving tells us in his ad- 
mirable " Life of Washington," when the gallant Greene 
was resting and refreshing himself at her Inn, on his way 
to Guilford Court-house in 1781, "fatigued, hungry, alone, 
*Tac. Ann. 3 Lib. ch. 51-53. 



'28 

and penniless," no sooner overheard Ins desponding- words, 
than she entered the room where lie was sitting-, closed 
the door, and, drawing from under her apron two bags of 
money which she had carefully hoarded, said, most uohly : 
" Take these, you will want them, and I can do without 
them." 

Let him read afresh that pledg-e which the young- ladies 
of Mecklenburg and Rowan, in the same old North State, 
are said to have entered into in the year 178^5 not to 
receive the attentions of young men who would not 
volunteer in defence of the country, — " being of opinion, 
(as the pledge reads,) that such persons as stay loitering 
at home, when the important calls of country demand 
their military services abroad, must certainly be destitute 
of that nobleness of sentiment, that brave and manly 
spirit, which would qualify them to be the defenders and 
guardians of the fair sex." 

Let him recall that charming incident of the ball 
given to Lafiiyette in the City of Baltimore, as he was 
passing along to the field of his Southern conflicts, and 
when to the question of one of the Baltimore belles of 
the Revolutionary period — " Why so gloomy at a ball, 
Marquis ? " — he replied, " I cannot enjoy the gayety of 
the scene while so many of the poor soldiers are without 
garments to keep them warm." — " We will supply them," 
was the noble reply of the ladies, and lo — instead of a 
hundred twinkling feet on a ball-room floor, a hundred 
twinkling fingers of devoted wives and daughters are ply- 
ing their needles, night and day, in making up the mate- 
rials furnished by patriot husbands and fathers, — one lady 
cuttino out with her own hands no less than five hundred 



pairs of pantaloons, and superintending- the making- of 
them for the poor soldiers. 

Let him read afresh the account of that memorahle 
association of ladies in Philadelphia, for the rehef of the 
poor soldiers in I78O, under the lead and direction of 
Esther De Berdt, (then the wife of Gen. Jose|)h Reed,) 
and of Sarah Franklin, (tiie daughter of our illustrious 
Bostonian, then Mrs. Bache,) who, having hought the 
linen with their pin-money, cut out and made, with their 
own hands, no less than twenty-two hundred shirts, mark- 
ing each one of them with the name of the married or 
unmarried lady who had worked upon it, and then threw 
their trinkets and jewelry into the common treasury 
besides. 

Let him read afresh such a memorandum as Mr. 
Jefferson has furnished us, of the contributions of females 
in Virginia in aid of the War of Independence : — 

" Mrs. Sarah Gary of Scotchtown, a watchchain, cost 
£!J sterling. 

Mrs. Ambler, five gold rings. 

Mrs. Rebecca Ambler, three gold rings. 

Mrs. Nicholas, a diamond drop." 

Ah ! if the secret history of those little rings and 
ornaments, of those precious souvenirs and trinkets and 
love-tokens, could have been copied from the hearts of 
those who contributed them, into records which the world 
might read, we should see how mucli woman can forget, 
how much woman can forego, when the perils of her 
Gountry call upon her for some signal act of self-sacri- 
fice and self-devotion. Yes, when the men of America 
shall be as ready to give up their own follies and fopperies 



S5 

and extravagances and vices, as some of tlieni are to 
rebuke and ridicule tlieir wives and daughters, we may 
look for a social reformation which shall leave nothing 
to be desired for purity, and nothing to be feared for 
Liberty. 

But I leave all further discussion of this point for 
some more convenient season. 

Nor do I propose to spend much of my rapidly flying- 
hour this evening, in any vague generalities or obvious 
commonplaces on the danger to freedom which is in- 
volved in what is commonly understood by luxurious in- 
dulgence. The whole argument upon this point may be 
summed np, as it seems to me, in two brief and simple 
propositions : — 

1. True Liberty can only be maintained by a moral 
and virtuous people. One of the great elemental ideas 
of freedom is Self-Government. This self-government 
is partly to be exercised by rulers elected by the peo})le 
and agreeably to Constitutions and Laws established and 
enacted by themselves or their representatives ; — but it 
is to be exercised partly, and in great part, let me say, 
by their own individual restraint and control of their own 
passions and their own wills. Lulividual self-discipline, 
the government of each one of us over ourselves, consti- 
tutes the largest part of the full idea of that self-govern- 
ment which is so often employed as the very synonyme of 
freedom. And whatever corrupts and debases the indi- 
vidual man, lowering his standard of integrity, dethron- 
ing the vicegerent of God within his breast, and sub- 
stituting ease and indolence and pleasure and profligacy 
for the aims and ends and obligations which are alone 



26 

worthy of a rational and responsible being, is by its very 
nature hostile to true freedom. It incapacitates men for 
the enjoyment of freedom. It incapacitates them for the 
discharge of those duties which are essential to the exist- 
ence of freedom. There must be government some- 
where, within us or without us. And just so far as indi- 
vidual, internal self-government is abandoned, just so far 
an externa], political restraint and compulsion must be 
substituted and must be endured. Individual indulgences, 
individual vices, individual crimes, — these are what occa- 
sion the necessity for prohibitions and penalties, for pun- 
ishments, prisons, and scaffolds; and when the moral 
sense and moral condition of the men and women com- 
posing a whole community has become thoroughly infect- 
ed and depraved, tyranny must soon come in, in some 
form or other, and by some means or other, to enforce 
that degree of subordination to authority, that measure 
of obedience to law, which is vital to the existence of 
every organized society. It is not written in the book of 
history, it is not written in the nature of man, it is not 
written in the will of God, that an immoral and vicious 
and dissolute people can ever remain a free people. There 
is no such thing as the permanent separation, in any such 
sense as this, — if, indeed, in any sense, — of morality and 
politics ; — and no glorifications of Liberty, however boast- 
ful or however defiant, can preserve any people from those 
chains and fetters, which immorality and vice will grad- 
ually weave and weld upon their limbs. Edmund Burke 
expressed the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, on 
this point, in that inimitable passage from one of his most 
celebrated letters, which cannot too often be recalled and 
rt'peated : — 



£7 

" Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion 
to their disposition to j)nt moral chains upon their own 
appetites ; in proportion as their love to justice is above 
their rapacity ; in proportion as they are more disj)ose(l 
to listen to the coimsels of the wise and good, in prefer- 
ence to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless 
a controlling- power upon will and appetite be placed 
somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more 
there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal con- 
stitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot 
be free. Their passions forge their fetters." 

'■2. But tliere is a physical view, too, which may serve 
for the second proposition, to which I referred. True 
Liberty can only be maintained l»y a manly and muscular 
people. " Who would be free," the poet tells us, " them- 
selves must strike the blow." And whoever would main- 
tain freedom must be able to strike a second and a third 
blow in its defence, as hard and as eflective as the first by 
which it was achieved ; and nmst keep themselves in a 
condition to do so, whenever summoned to the strnggle. 
And whatever impairs the vigor, enfeebles the nerve, 
dwarfs and dwindles the stature and ])roportions, under- 
mines the health and heartiness of a people, melting down 
their manhood and their womanhood into mere courtesy 
and compliment, and frittering away their energies upon 
mere form and show and ceremony, until, like the masses 
of Rome in its degenerate days, they care only for two 
things, — paneni et Cu'ceuses^ — food and festivals, eating 
and enjoyment ; — whatever tends to })roduce such ener- 
vating and emasculating results as these upon a popula- 
tion, does just so much to prepare them for falling an 



28 

easy prey to any form of oppression or of tyranny which 
may approach tliem, either from abroad or from among 
themselves. This is the physical view. 

Now it would be the merest waste of time and of 
words to frame elaborate periods in order to prove, that 
what is generally understood by luxurious living is to be 
condemned on both these grounds, — that it wars at once 
against mind and body, engendering those diseases and 
weaknesses, alike physical and moral, which are incom- 
patible with a strenuous assertion or a successful mainten- 
ance or defence of freedom. No man or woman would 
for an instant dispute the doctrine in the abstract, how- 
ever reluctant they might be to admit that their own indi- 
vidual and personal indulgence, in this or that particular 
luxurious habit, could have a tendency towards producing 
so grave and serious a mischief. We all know, however, 
that a nation is but an aggregate of individuals, as the 
ocean is but an aggregate of drops, and that no one can 
so live unto himself, as to escape bis proportionate share 
of responsibility for the character and composition of the 
whole. 

It is not, then, only a momentary pecuniary pressure 
or financial revulsion, nor is it only a consideration of 
permanent religious or moral obligation, which may well 
lead us all to abate something of our fancy for the pride 
and pomp and vanity of the world, and to put a sea- 
sonable curb upon our appetite for luxurious living, but 
patriotism, a love of country, a love of liberty, call upon 
us, in almost the very words of Barre to Quincy in 177-^5 
to beware, to beware, not indeed, of a true and refined 
taste, but of that meretricious and extravagant taste for 



m 

equipage and furniture and dress, for balls and ballets and 
banquets and vohiptuous excesses of all sorts, which is a 
deadly poison to Freedom. 

It was in this spirit that John Adams, in that noble 
clause of our own Massachusetts State Constitution, which, 
in the Convention of IS.'^O, he boasted of having' written 
carefully with his own hand, included frugalitij^ to- 
gether with industry and benevolence and public and 
private charity, among the virtues which it was made 
the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future 
periods of the commonwealth, to countenance and incul- 
cate. 

And in this spirit, too, a greater even than John 
Adams, the immortal Father of his country himself, pre- 
pared the following- paragraph for his Farewell Address, 
wdiich though not ultimately retained by his advisers, and 
therefore not familiar even to those who reverence that 
document most deeply, has been fortunately preserved in 
the original draft, as given by him to Mr. Claypoole, the 
Philadelphia printer, and as beautifully j)rinted at the ex- 
pense of its present munificent owner, Mr. James Lenox, 
of New York : — 

" Cultivate industry and frugality, as auxiliaries to 
good morals and sources of private and public prosperity. 
Is there not room to regret that our propensity to ex- 
pense exceeds our means for it ? Is there not more 
luxurji among us, and more diffusively, than suits the 
actual stage of our national progress ? Whatever may 
be the apology for luxury in a country, mature in the 
arts which are its ministers and the cause of national 
opulence, can it promote the advantage of a young coun- 



30 

tiy, almost wholly agricultural, in the infancy of the arts, 
and certainly not in the maturity of wealth ^ " 

Such were the reflections which weighed on the heart 
of Washington sixty years ago, before the world had be- 
gun to go by steam, and when fast men and fast women 
were as rare as slow ones are now. What new emphasis 
would he not have given to the warning, could he have 
witnessed the social state of America, and especially of 
"young America," at the present day! Would he not 
have welcomed even worse reverses and calamities than 
any which have visited us of late years, if nothing else 
could seasonably arouse us to the dangers of a corrupt- 
ing and cankering luxury ] 

And now, my friends, having thus given in my un- 
equivocal adhesion to the doctrines involved in these 
memorable warning^s which have come down to us from 
the distant and the dead, from tlie great and good of 
other countries as well as of our own, so far at least as 
they are aimed at what may fairly be included in the idea 
of extravagant and luxurious living, I turn to a brief con- 
sideration of the question, whether everything like a taste 
for the Fine Arts is to fall under the general ban which 
that eloquent British statesman and ardent friend to 
America, in his dialogue with Quincy, would seem to 
have pronounced upon it, and whether architecture and 
sculpture and painting are, indeed, to be altogether pro- 
scribed as poisonous to liberty ? 

Must we, in order to save our free institutions from 
overthrow, fall back upon the old laws of Lycurgus, that 
" the ceilings of our houses shall be wrought with no 
tool but the axe, and the doors shaped with nothing but 



81 

the saw 1 " Must our teeniiiig qiuinies be sealed up 
agaiust the chisel (tf the sculptor, and no counterfeit pre- 
sentment of the beauties of nature or the conceptions of 
genius ever be permitted to glow upon the canvas, and 
to greet us from the walls of our public buildings or of 
our private dwellings ^ Are our infant galleries of art 
to be closed up and abated as schools of immorality and 
nurseries of corruption ] Are Phidias and Praxiteles, 
Michael Angelo and Raphael, and our own Allston and 
Crawford, and Trumbull and Stuart, and Cole and Ho- 
r: tio Greenough, — not to venture upon any selection 
among so many living names, — to be classed henceforth 
among the conspirators against republican liberty 1 Must 
we even hide away, in the most secret crypts of our col- 
lege libraries, the drawings of the ancient ruins of Hercu- 
laneum or Pompeii, of Athens or of Rome, so that while 
they may be of some service, " as a matter of curiosity to 
the speculative," they may not get abroad and bring upon 
ourselves a like destruction to that which they so power- 
fully depict I This, you remember, was Col. Barre's 
idea ; and, extravagant as it may seem, it may furnish 
us a theme for a few wholesome reflections. 

Beyond all doubt, a taste for the Fine Arts is one o 
the most expensive tastes in which an individual or a 
community can indulge, and we should never lose sight 
of the idea that it may easily be encouraged to an extent 
which may bring the wealthiest among us to bankruptcy 
and beggary. This is a danger of abuse and excess; but 
it should not be forgotten by artists, when they are disap- 
pointed in obtaining orders for expensive works. 

Beyond a doubt, too, painting and sculpture may be 



32 

degraded to the service of ministering to the merest per- 
sonal pride and vanity, — a service aUke injurious to their 
own advancement and to the manhness and moral health 
of a community. " I entirely agree with you," wrote 
Edmund Burke to an eminent member of the Royal 
Academy, " that the rage of the inhabitants of this country 
for having their phizes perpetuated, whether they are 
worthy of it or not, is one great obstacle to the advance- 
ment of art ; because it makes that branch more profita- 
ble than any other, and therefore makes many men of 
great talents consider it as the ultimate object of their 
art, instead of the means of that object." What would 
Burke have said " of the rage of the inhabitants for hav- 
ing their phizes perpetuated, whether they are worthy of 
it or not, ' if he had lived in our land and in this age, 
when to the temptation of painting and sculpture, of 
crayon, engraving, and lithography, is added that of chrys- 
tallotypes and ambrotypes, and even of twenty-five cent 
and ten cent daguerreotypes, — and when, too, it seems to 
depend on the caprice of artists and publishers, or, per- 
haps, on the pecuniary facility of the subjects themselves, 
wdio shall be included among the champions of Freedom, 
or who shall find places in the gallery of Illustrious 
Statesmen ! 

But this is but a trivial abuse compared with others to 
which the Fine Arts are peculiarly and proverbially liable. 
We all know that they may be, and often have been, 
prostituted to the most corrupting and licentious pur- 
poses. And 1 cannot omit the opportunity of entering 
my humble but earnest protest against their too common 
employment in pandering to the depraved and prurient 



appetites of vuloar and vicious iniiuls. Away with tlie 
old maxim which is so often quoted to palhate the gross- 
est indecency — "Evil he to liim who evil thinks." Tliat 
maxim may be allowed to retain its historical place 
as the motto of the Order of the Garter ; and was \A'ell 
enoufyh to cover the enil)arassment and confusion arisino- 
out of the ludicrous accident which is sometimes said to 
have given occasion to the original institution of that 
" most noble order." You all have heard the story. It 
is said that the Countess of Salisbury, at a Court ball, 
happening to drop her garter, King Edward III. took it 
up and presented it to her with these words : Honi soit 
qui mal jj pcnsc. — But the maxim of modern civilization 
and refinement and Cliristianity sliould rather be — Evil 
be to him that evil does ; — whether lie does it by word 
or act, by lip or hand, by pen, pencil, chisel, brush or 
burin. The day has almost gone by, I trust, for the 
niultij)lication of indecent and lascivious pictures. We 
may endure them, and even sometimes admire them 
against our moral sense, on the cracked canvas or in 
the crumbling marble of an old master. Sucli produc- 
tions peculiarly befitted the dark idolatries and corrupt 
obscenities of other ages. But the Artist, and more 
especially the American Artist, who, in this nineteenth 
century, in this age of Christianity and civilization, can 
find nothing more worthy of his genius than such exhibi- 
tions and exposures, may think himself well off if he 
meets with no sterner rebuke than that his productions 
should attract neither praise nor purchasers, and should 
be left to remain a drug — a poisonous drug — upon his 
own polluted hands. I know it is not al\vays easy to fix 



84 

the precise vanishing- point, if I may so speak, at which 
dehcacy ends and indehcacy hegins. I do not forg^et 
how readily the cry of primness and prudery is raised 
against any scruples of the sort. And I am aware how 
eagerly some of the amateurs and connoisseurs in art 
cling to its ancient prerogative of dealing in what they 
softly style the nude. And some of them might be 
pardoned for discarding all dress and drapery in their 
designs, since they have proved themselves such miser- 
able mantuamakers and such abominable tailors. But 
rarely upon any other ground. 

We often hear it said, indeed, that " Art must be true 
to Nature." And so it must be. But it must be true 
to something else besides Nature, It must be true to 
virtue and freedom, true to purity and patriotism, true to 
morals and to religion, or it will cease to be worthy of 
the patronage of Christian freemen. What has not 
Religion done for art ! What has ever inspired such 
exquisite delineations, such suldime conceptions, such 
enchanting portraitures, such grand and glorious group- 
ings, such glowing and gorgeous colorings, as the scenes 
of the Bible, wrought out in faith and reverence, to deco- 
rate the shrines and altars of the cathedrals and chapels 
of other ages and other lands ? How much of their 
mexpressible richness and radiance would have been lost 
to those glorious works of the old masters, which have 
received the homage of centuries, and which we all make 
pilgrimages over land and sea to enjoy a single sight of, — 
how much of their richness and radiance would have been 
lost, had not a devout faith in God and in Christ, not only 
furnished the theme, but prepared the pallet, directed the 



35 

brush, and dipped it in tlie very hues of heaven ! Let 
Art, in all its departments, architecture, sculpture, and 
painting- alike, never foil to recognize and acknowledge 
its obligations to Religion ; and if simpler forms of wor- 
ship, in later days and in our own land, afford less scope 
for its employment on religious themes, let it, at least, 
abstain from doing despite to its earliest and noblest 
source of inspiration, by ministering to irreligion and 
vice, and by employing a divine faculty on that which is 
not only earthly, but " sensual and devilish." Art can be 
true to nature, and true to itself, without groping in the 
chambers of imagery to bring forth whatever is most 
offensive and unclean ; and the artist who, in these days, 
presumes upon his genius to violate the decencies of 
society, and who thinks to make delicacy of outline or 
brilliancy of coloring atone for the want of decency of 
design, deserves the hoot of every true friend to freedom 
and to virtue, — such a hoot and such a hue and cry, as 
recently and most deservedly followed those publishers 
and sellers of indecent prints and engravings in the city 
of New York. This is, indeed, the sort of art which, in 
the words of Barre to Quincy, is poisonous to freedom, 
and it may be that those drawings of Herculaneum were 
not altogether exempt from the censure. 

But I turn, my friends, to the closing, and yet the 
principal thoughts of this Address. I turn to a brief 
consideration of the question, whether our own land and 
our own condition of society do not afford ample oppor- 
tunity for the enjoyment and encouragement of the Fine 
Arts, without danger to Liberty, and without just lia- 
bility to the charge of furthering and fostering a })er- 
nicious and poisonous luxury. 



36 

And I know not how I can so well commence my 
reply to this question as by quoting for your instruction 
and admiration a few of the emphatic and noble sentences 
of the great orator of Ancient Greece, — the greatest 
orator of the world : — 

" Mark, O Atlienians," said Demosthenes in his third 
Olynthiac, — -" Mark, O Athenians, what a summary con- 
trast may be drawn between the doings in our olden 
time and in yours. It is a tale brief and familiar to all ; 
for the examples by which you may still be happy are 
found not abroad, men of Athens, but at home. Our 
forefathers, whom the speakers humored not nor caressed, 
as these men caress you, for five and forty years took the 
leadership of the Greeks by general consent, and brought 
above ten thousand talents iuto the citadel ; and the king 
of this country was submissive to them, as a barbarian 
should be to Greeks ; and many glorious trophies they 
erected for victories won by their own fighting on land 
and sea, and they are the sole people in the world who 
have bequeathed a renown superior to envy. Such were 
their merits in the aftkirs of Greece: See what they 
were at home, both as citizens and as men. Their public 
edifices and ornaments of such beauty and grandeur, in 
temples and consecrated furniture, that posterity have no 
power to surpiss them. In private they were so modest 
and attaclied to the principles of our Constitution, that 
whoever knows the style of house which Aristides had, 
or Miltiades and the illustrious of that day, perceives it 
to be no grander than those of their neighbors. Their 
politics were njt for money-making; each felt it his duty 
to exalt the Conmionwealth. Bv a conduct honorable 



37 

towards the Greeks, pious to the gods, hrotherhke among 
themselves, tliey justly attained a high prosperity." 

Listen to this preenn'nent orator of antiquity onee more, 
while he unfolds with even more distinctness this noble 
discrimination, which seems to have been a favorite theme 
with him, between public magnificence and private mod- 
eration and frugality. He is discoursing on the regula- 
tion of the State, and has just been declaiming with great 
boldness and severity against the degeneracy of the Atlie- 
nians of his day, as compared with their fathers and 
ancestors. 

" The edifices they have left to us," said he, " their 
decorations of our city, of our temples, of our harbors, of 
all our public structures, are so numerous and so magnifi- 
cent, that their successors can make no addition. Look 
around you," he exclaimed, '' to their vestibules, their arse- 
nals, their porticos, and all those honors of our city which 
they transmitted to us." (And remember that he was 
standing on the Bema in the Pnyx, from which the Pro- 
pyloea, and the Parthenon, and so many of the exquisite 
and inimitable temples of Athens, could all be taken in at 
a glance.) "Look around you," said he, "at these mag- 
nificent structures ! Yet were the private habitations of 
the men of eminence in those times, so moderate, so con- 
sonant to that equality, the characteristic of our constitu- 
tion, that if any of you know^s the house of Themistocles, 
of Citnon, of Aristides, of Miltiades, or of any of these 
illustrious personages, he knows that it is not distin- 
guished by the least mark of grandeur. But now, ye 
men of Athens, as to public works the State is satisfied, 
if roads be repaired, if water be supplied, if walls be wdii- 



38 

tened, if any trifle be provided. Not that I blame those 
who have executed such works. No ! I l)larne you who 
can think so meanly as to be satisfied with such fruits of 
their administration. Then, in private life, of the men 
who have conducted our affairs, some have built houses 
not only more magnificent than those of other citizens, 
but superior to our public edifices ; others have purchased 
and improved an extent of land greater than all their 
dreams of riches ever presented to their fancies." 

In this forcible and most felicitous contrast, between 
private simplicity and moderation and public magnifi- 
cence and splendor, we may find the very clue and pass- 
key to a policy, which marked the earlier and better 
periods of ancient Greece, and which may reconcile, in 
our own day, and in our own land, the highest and most 
effective encouragement of the Fine Arts, in all their 
departments, with entire immunity and safety to morality 
and freedom. 

It is only in their unworthy ministrations to private 
vanity and voluptuousness, that painting and sculpture 
and architecture are dangerous to liberty and destructive 
to virtue. It is only in garnishing and furbishing the 
mansions of pride and ostentation, of ambition and arro- 
gance, that they too often become responsible for a waste- 
ful and ridiculous excess of expenditure, and too often 
engender a licentious luxuriousness of living, which are at 
war with all the just simplicities and equalities of repub- 
lican society. I would not forbid or discourage, indeed, 
the modest portrait or the classic bust of the loved and the 
lost, or even of the honored and the living, which are the 
precious decorations of so many of our parlors and libra- 



39 

lies. I would not banish from the private habitations of 
such as can ali'ord tliem, the glowiuo- landscape or the 
fragrant flower-[)iece, the tasteful Parian or the enduring- 
bronze. My precept would be strangely at variance with 
my practice, were I to advocate or even intimate such an 
idea. A thousand-fold nobler and purer and worthier 
are the gratifications which ornaments and souvenirs like 
these communicate, than any which can be derived from 
the most gforgeous upholstery, or the most glittering mir- 
rors, or the most massive and magnificent plate, which 
ever dazzled the eyes of a gaping crowd, or bedizened 
the halls of a vulgar fashion. And those are to be hon- 
ored, at home and abroad, who do not shut up such treas- 
ures for their own selfish enjoyment, but open them wide, 
from time to time, for the entertainment and instruction 
of the community in which they live, or, better still, for 
some occasional purpose of philanthropy or of patriotism. 
I cannot forget my own good fortune in being present, 
by the kind invitation of the late Sir Robert Peel, a few 
weeks more than twelve years ago, at the annual exhibi- 
tion of liis own celebrated gallery in Whitehall Gardens, 
where I found tiie humblest disciples of art mingling with 
the highest dignitaries of the realm, — Landseer and Les- 
lie and Stansfield and Fielding and Westmacott, with the 
Duke of Cambridge and the Duke of Wellington and 
Lord Palmerston and L^rd John Russell, — now gazing 
with delight at a Cuyp or a Hobbima, a Gerard Douw or 
an Ostade, a Wouvermans or a Vandervelde, — now gath- 
ering with rapture around the original Chapeau de Paille 
of Rubens, (which had cost Sir Robert nearly eighteen 
thousand dollars,) — or now pausing for another glance of 



40 

admiration at the matchless portraits of Dr. Johnson, 
Mrs. Tlirale, and Boswell, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. 

But let us not forget that the true mission of the fine 
arts in a republican land, and in our own land especially, 
is to adorn the State, to exalt the Commonwealth, to 
elevate and ennoble our country, in our own eyes and in 
the eyes of others, to illustrate its history, to portray its 
magnificent scenery, to commemorate its great events, to 
immortalize its sages and heroes and patriots, and to pre- 
sent to the daily sight and daily reverence, not of a few 
lordly patrons or wealthy proprietors only, but of the 
whole people, of every passer-by, such memorials of the 
great men and great deeds of the past, as shall insj)ire 
them with a generous pride in their institutions, and with 
a gallant determination to maintain and defend them. 
Ours, in a word, is peculiarly a land for free galleries 
and out-of-door statues, from which he who runs may 
read that republics are not always ungrateful, and that 
patriotic services and sacrifices may not always be un- 
remembered. I should hardly be afraid to hazard the 
remark, that more of the common people had studied and 
learned something of the history of their own land, on the 
bas-reliefs and legends of our noble statue of Franklin, 
during the two years since it was completed, than in any 
library in our city during ten times the same period. 

There will be no danger to liberty, my friends, in such 
indulgences in taste as these. Safety, security, rather. 
The images of the pure and good will do something to 
shame down vice and profligacy in our streets. The 
statues of the patriotic and the brave will stand like sen- 
tries over our freedom, — more vigilant and effective, and 



41 

certainly less corruptible sentries than many of our living- 
watchmen and policemen ; — they will stand like sentinels 
over our institutions, challeng-ing and rebuking the first 
approaches of sedition or treachery ; while from our larger 
and loftier monuments will be repeated to the present and 
to tlie future the great lesson of the past, that in union 
there is strength and victory and glory ! Yes, the fabled 
music, which the rising- sun drew forth from the image of 
Memnon, will find its audible antitype upon our American 
soil ; and from the massive bronzes or sculptures which 
commemorate the glories of a Washington, the risen and 
still soaring- sini of liberty will draw forth the choral song- 
of " Union, Union, All's well," to find ever a welcome 
and joyous response in the hearts of twenty millions of 
people ! 

Nor can there be the slightest danger that American 
Art will be in want of patronage in such a line of em- 
ployment, — for it will not depend on the mere caprice or 
favoritism of individuals, rich to-day and poor to-morrow, 
but the wealth of the whole community, within reason- 
able bounds, will be pledged and mortgaged to its sup- 
port. Certainly there can be no dearth of opportunities 
or of subjects for the genius of our Artists, in a country 
whose soil is so continuously chequered over with the land- 
ing-places of Pilgrims or of Cavaliers, the council cham- 
bers of Planters or of Patriots, the birthplaces and cradles 
and battle fields of Liberty and Indejiendence. 

It is hardly too much to say, that beyond all other 
lands, this great and glorious Republic of ours affords 
scope, in its institutions and in its history, for the illustra- 
tions and embellishments of Art. We have not, indeed, 

6 



4<2 

as yet, — I hope we shall never liave, — any single, all- 
ahsorbing, overshadowing Capital, like London or Paris, of 
unimaginable and inexhaustible wealth, with its thousands 
of acres of palaces and parks, and its standing army of 
statues and monuments and portraits, — where Art might 
almost be appalled at the idea that so much has been 
done already, and that so little seems to remain to be 
done, or to find any room for being done, — where genius 
might almost be found, like the youthful inheritor of a 
mighty Kingdom of antiquity, sighing over the achieve- 
ments of the past and lamenting that there were not more 
worlds to be conquered. 

We have, it is true, a National Capital, where much 
has been done, and much is being done, sometimes in good 
taste and sometimes in very bad taste, but always with a 
loose and lavish profuseness of expenditure, in adorning 
and embellishing the offices of Government, and in com- 
memorating the fathers of the Republic, But architec- 
ture will recognize a still wider field for its development 
in the two or three and thirty capitals of our separate 
States, and in the countless cities, larger than many, and 
some of them larger than any, of these political centres, 
which already exist, or are still springing into exist- 
ence, within the limits of those States. And what richer 
or more picturesque and varied materials can Sculpture or 
Painting discover or desire, the world over, than the sub- 
jects which belong to the rise and progress of our Repub- 
lic, to the settlement of so many colonies, to the struggles 
of the settlers with savage or with civilized foes, to the 
establishment of our Independence, and to the various 
scenes of civil controversy or military combat, through 



43 

which we have reached the inag-iiificeiit maturity of the 
present moment ! We can hardly turn over a page of 
American history, — whether we begin with the Puritan at 
Plymouth Rock, or with the Miuute Man at Lexington, 
or Concord — without lighting upon subjects which appeal 
emphatically to the commemoration of art, and which we 
should all delight to see perpetuated by the pencil or the 
chisel. 

Let me borrow the inimitable words of another in sug- 
gesting one or two such subjects by way of illustration. 
They are the words of old John Adams, writing to his 
friend Judge Tudor, in the year 1817- — 

" Is your daughter, Mrs. Stewart, who I am credibly 
informed is one of the most accomplished of ladies, a 
painter ? Are you acquainted with Miss Lydia Smith, 
who, I am also credibly informed, is one of the most 
accomplished ladies, and a painter ] Do you know Mr. 
Sargent] Do you correspond with your old companion 
in arms, Col. John Trumbull 1 Do you think Fisher 
will be an historical painter? Whenever you shall find 
a painter, male or female, I pray you to suggest a scene 
and a subject for the pencil. 

" The scene is the council chamber in the old Town 
House in Boston. The date is in the month of February, 
I76I, nine years before you entered my office in Cole 
Lane. As this was five years before you entered college, 
you must have been in the second form of Master Lov- 
ell's school. 

" That council chamber was as respectable an apart- 
ment as the House of Commons or the House of Lords 
in Great Britain in proportion, or that in the State House 



44 

in Philadelphia, in which the Declaration of Independence 
was signed in 1776. In this chaniher, round a great fire, 
were seated five Judges, with Lieutenant-Governor Hutch- 
inson at their head, as Chief Justice, all arrayed in their 
new, fresh, rich robes of scarlet English broadcloth ; in 
their large cambric bands, and immense judicial wigs. 
In this chamber were seated at a long table all the barris- 
ters of law of Boston, and of the neighboring County of 
Middlesex, in gowns, bands, and tie wigs. They were 
not seated on ivory chairs, but their dress was more sol- 
emn and more pompous than that of the Roman Senate, 
when the Gauls broke in upon them. In a corner of the 
room must be placed as a spectator and an auditor, wit, 
sense, imagination, genius, pathos, reason, prudence, elo- 
quence, learning, and immense reading, hanging by the 
shoulders on two crutches, covered with a great cloth 
coat, in the person of Mr. Pratt, who had been solicited 
on both sides, but would engage on neither, being, as 
Chief Justice of New York, about to leave Boston for- 
ever. Two portraits, at more than full length, of King 
Charles the Second, and of King James the Second, in 
splendid golden frames, were hung up on the most con- 
spicuous sides of the apartment. 

" One circumstance more, Samuel Quincy and John 
Adams had been admitted barristers at that term. John 
was the youngest (and here he is speaking of himself) ; 
he should be painted looking like a short thick Arch- 
bishop of Canteibury, seated at the table with a pen in 
his hand, lost in admiration, now and then minuting those 
poor notes which your pupil. Judge Minot, has printed in 
his history. .... 



45 

" I have given you a sketch of the stage and the 
scenery. , . . Now for the actors and per- 
formers. Mr. Gridley argued with his cliaracteristic 
learning, ingenuity, and dignity, and said everything that 
could be said in favor of Cockle's Petition. 
Mr. Thacher followed him on the other side, and argued 
with the softness of manners, the ingenuity and cool 
reasoning, which were remarkable in his amiable char- 
acter. But Otis was a flame of fire ! with a prompti- 
tude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid 
summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of 
legal authorities, a prophetic glance of his eye into futu- 
rity, and a torrent of impetuous eloquence, he hurried 
away everything before him. American Independence 
was then and there born ; the seeds of patriots and heroes 
were then and there sown, to defend the vigorous youth, 
the non sine Diis animosus infans. Every man of a 
crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, 
ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then 
and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition 
to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and 
there the child Independence was born. In fifteen years, 
namely, in 177^! ^^e grew up to manhood, and declared 
himself free." 

What a picture is this to have been left so long un- 
painted and even unattempted ! The materials still exist. 
The old building is still standing in State Street, and the 
portraits of the principal actors are still within reach. 
Since I first sketched this address, James Otis himself has 
taken his station in breathing marble at Mount Auburn, 
from the hands of the lamented Crawford, — 



46 

" A station like the herald Mercury, 
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill." 

But the picture of the scene which made James Otis 
famous forever still waits for the coming artist of 
America. 

Let me give you another scene from the same glowing- 
pen, writing to the same friend a fortnight afterwards : — 

" Since our National Legislature have establislied a 
national painter, (says he, referring to Col. Trumbull,) 
a wise measure, for which I thank them, my imagination 
runs upon the art, and has already painted I know not 
how many historical pictures. I have sent you one ; 
give me leave to send another. The bloody rencoun- 
ter between the citizens and the soldiers, on the 5th of 
March, 177^5 produced a tremendous sensation through- 
out the town and country. The people assembled first at 
Faneuil Hall, and adjourned to the Old South Church, to 
the number, as was conjectured, of ten or twelve thousand 
men, among whom were the most virtuous, substantial, 

independent, disinterested, and intelligent citizens 

A remonstrance to the governor, or the governor and 
council, was ordained, and a demand that the regular 
troops should be removed from the town. A committee 
was appointed to present this remonstrance, of which 
Samuel Adams was the chairman. 

" Now for the picture. The theatre and the scenery 
are the same with those at the discussion of writs of 
assistance. The same glorious portraits of King Charles 
IL and King James IL, to which might be added, and 
should be added, little miserable likenesses of Gov. Win- 
throp. Gov. Bradstreet, Gov. Endicott, and Gov. Belcher, 



47 

hung 11}) in obscure corners of the room. Lt. Gov. Hut- 
chinson, in the absence of the governor, must be placed at 
the head of the council table ; Lt. Col. Dalrym])le, com- 
mander-in-chief of his majest3''s military forces, taking 
rank of all his majesty's counsellors, must be seated by 
the side of the lieutenant-governor and commander-in- 
chief of the province. Eight and twenty counsellors 
must be painted, all seated at the council board. Let 
me see — what costume ^ What was the fashion of that 
day, in the month of March ? Large white wigs, Eng- 
lish scarlet cloth cloaks, some of them with gold-laced 
hats, not on their heads, indeed, in so august a presence, 
but on the table before them, or under the table beneath 
them. Before these illustrious personages appeared 
Samuel Adams, a member of the House of Represen- 
tatives and their clerk, now at the head of the committee 

of the great assembly at the Old South Church 

He represented the state of the town and the country ; 
the dangerous, ruinous, and fatal effects of standing 
armies in populous cities in time of peace, and the de- 
termined resolution of the public, that the regular troops, 

at all events, should be removed from the town 

The heads of Hutchinson and Dalrymple were laid to- 
gether in whispers for a long time ; when the whisj)ering 
ceased, a long and solemn pause ensued, extremely pain- 
ful to an impatient, expecting audience. Hutchinson, in 
time, broke silence ; he had consulted with Col. Dalrym- 
ple, and the colonel had authorized him to say that he 
mioht order one reii^iment down to the Castle, if that 
would satisfy the people. With a self-recollection, a self- 
possession, a self-command, a presence of mind that was 



48 

admired by every man present, Samuel Adams arose 
with an air of dignity and majesty, of wliich he was 
sometimes capable, stretched forth his hand, though even 
then quivering with palsy, and vvith an harmonious voice 
and decisive tone, said, ' If the Lieutenant-Governor or 
Colonel Dalrymple, or both together, have authority to 
remove one regiment, tliey have authority to remove two, 
and nothing short of the total evacuation of the town by 
all the regular troops, will satisfy the public mind or pre- 
serve the peace of the province.' 

" These few words thrilled through the veins of every 
man in the audience, and produced the great result. 
After a little awkward hesitation, it was agreed that the 
town should be evacuated, and both regiments sent to 

the Castle The painter should seize upon the 

critical moment, when Samuel Adams stretched out his 
arm and made his last speech. It will be as difficult to 
do justice to as to paint an Apollo ; and the transaction 
deserves to be painted as much as the Surrender of Bur- 
goyne. Whether any artist will ever attempt it, I know 
not." 

But we, in this day, know that the artist will come, 
is coming, must come, who will attempt it, and will 
succeed in the attempt. 

One more scene from the same source: "You inquire, 
in your kind letter of the 19th, (wrote John Adams to 
William Plumer, March 2S, 1813,) whether 'every 
member of Congress did, on the 4th of July, 177^? "i 
fact, cordially approve of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence.' They who were then members all signed it, 
and, as I could not see their hearts, it would be hard 



49 

for nie to say tliat they did not a])prove it ; but, as far as 
I could penetrate the intricate, internal foldings of their 
souls, I then believed, and have not since altered my 
opinion, that there were several who signed with regret, 
and several others with many doubts and much luke- 
warmness. The measure had been upon the carj)et for 
months, and obstinately opposed from day to day. Ma- 
jorities were constantly against it. For many days the 
majority depended upon Mr. Hevves, of North Carolina.^ 
While a memlter one day was speaking, and reading 
documents from all tlie colonies, to prove that the pub- 
lic opinion, the general sense of all, was in favor of the 
measure, when lie came to North Carolina, and j)roduced 
letters and public proceedings which demonstrated that 
the majority of that colony were in favor of it, Mr. 
Hevves, who had hitherto constantly voted against it, 
started suddenly upright, and lifting up both his hands 
to Heaven, as if he had been in a trance, cried out, ' It 
is done, and I will abide by it ! ' I would give more 
for a perfect painting of the terror and horror upon the 
faces of the old majority, at that critical moment, than 
for the best })iece of Raphael." 

So said John Adams, and so say we all. That is a 
picture for the Old North State, and one which would do 
more than all her Mecklenburgh pretensions, be they 
ever so well founded, to identify her with that glorious 
Declaration, of which Adams himself was the Colossus 
on the floor of Congress. 

1 Joseph Hewes, a native of New Jersey, and a Quaker by edueation, 
but of wlioni it is said that when the Quakers put tbrtli a testimony 
against the proceedings of Congress in 1775, he withdrew from their 
communion. 

7 



50 

Certainly, my friends, no more graphic and inspiring 
libretto for a great work of art was ever composed, than 
may be found in these familiar letters of old John Adams. 
Too many of our American artists seem to think that 
there is nothing worthy of their notice on their own soil, 
that the first secret of all success is to expatriate them- 
selves, — ^to go abroad and stay abroad to study the great 
models of Greece and Rome. Rogers, the poet, who 
knew what Italy is, and who has so helped us all to know 
it, and whose walls were covered with so many gems of the 
old masters, once told me that in his judgment nobody 
need go twenty miles out of London to see as fine works 
of art as the world afforded, referring particularly to the 
Elgin marbles in the British Museum and the Cartoons 
of Raphael at Hampton Court. But it is not too late 
for American artists to learn that they need not go twenty 
miles out of Boston to find as good subjects, certainly 
as the world can afford ; that it may be as well for some 
of them, at least, to stay at home, or certainly to return 
home, and to study the history of their own land. They 
will find models and characters there, which can be but 
poorly supplied by the false gods and fabulous heroes of 
an idolatrous antiquity. And there will be no danger 
that their statues will go down to decorate the hall 
of Neptune or the caves of the mermaids, as those of 
Webster and of John Adams himself did, not long ago. 
There is no consideration which affords me more satisfac- 
tion in performing this humble labor of love for the artists 
of Boston, than that it is for the advancement of their 
patriotic purpose of securing an equestrian statue of 
Washington, designed and moulded by a native artist, 



51 

tiiu] cast by native im'clianics, and wholly to be com- 
pleted, like yonder Franklin, on our own soil. 

I cannot forget that a scene was witnessed at Wash- 
ington, a little more than eleven years ago, which will 
one day or other furnish the subject of another of our 
great historical pictures. The Representatives of the 
people are assembled in the Hall which has so recently 
been abandoned. The customary acknowledgment of the 
God of nations has been made, and his blessing invoked 
on the day's labors and duties. The Speaker has assumed 
the chair, and the clerk has just finished the reading of 
the iournal. A venerable fi«-ure is seen rising" to address 
the House. Associated with the longest and most varied 
public service, conmiencing under the Presidency of 
Washington, and by no means ending, — rather beginning 
again, — at the close of his own Presidency ; associated, 
too, with the purest integrity and the highest ability and 
accomplishments ; — all eyes are riveted u])on that figure 
as it rises. A paper is seen in the outstretched hand. 
A voice is heard, in broken accents, from those aged lips, 
trembling-, but not with fear. But hand, voice, figure 
are at once perceived to be sinking under the effort. 
Affectionate colleagues, skilful physicians, and friends 
from his own State and from other States, hasten to his 
support. The still -breathing form is borne out into the 
rotundo, followed in silence by a House impatient of any 
prescribed ceremonies of adjournment. Illustrious Sena- 
tors meet them from the other wing of the capitol. The 
birthday of Washington intervenes, and Providence still 
averts a blow which might associate that day with any- 
thino- but the gladness and gratitude which must ever 



5^ 

belong to it. In the Speaker's private room the last 
striig-gle is witnessed, not many days after, and the noblest 
hearts of South Carolina and Virginia are soon found 
mingling their sympathies with those of Massachusetts, 
over one whose enviable privilege it was to fall in the 
discharge of his duties, and to die beneath the very roof 
of the Capitol ! Can any American painter desire a 
grander subject for his pencil X One would have thought 
that it would have been seized upon ere now, before the 
traditions of that scene should have grown fainter, and 
the living witnesses of it fewer. An American painter, 
as we are proud to remember, (the father of the venera- 
ble Lord Lyndhurst,) won his richest reputation by im- 
mortalizing a kindred theme. But the death of Chatham 
was not more august than that of John Quincy Adams. 
The men who surrounded Chatham, though decked in 
ermine and decorated with orders, were not more worthy 
of illustration than our own Clays and Calhouns and 
Berriens and Bentons and Websters, all of whom would 
be included in such a group. 

But not New England history or New England men 
alone have furnished materials for historical commemora- 
tion. In sinoliiio- out the Adamses as at once the suff- 
gesters and the subjects of American art, we have liter- 
ally but commenced with the first letter of the Alphabet 
of Patriotism. We might follow down that Alphabet, 
letter competing with letter, to its very close, — as far 
down as W, certainly, the initial not only of our Web- 
ster, but of a name above every name in the annals of 
human liberty, — and find scarce a consonant or a vowel 
without its corresponding and manifold title to commem- 



53 

oration. Every colony, every State, every county, 
every city, almost every village, has its great names and 
its glorious associations. And I need not say, tliat there 
are some names and some associations which helong 
everywhere, — which are the property of nothing less 
than the whole nation, and the commemoration of which 
can never he confined to any territorial localities, nor 
exhausted hy any numher of repetitions. 

As I passed along the streets of Baltimore, a few 
days since, I saw in a niche constructed for the purpose, 
on the front of a new and noble store, a really beautiful 
full length statue of Washington, in pure white marble, 
recently erected by a successful trader of that city, 
wholly at his own expense, and executed among the 
latest works of the accomplished and lamented Barthol- 
omew. The " Monumental City " has long had a statue 
of Washington, surmounting a magnificent column, of 
which it may w^ell be proud ; — but nobody in Baltimore 
dreams that there can be too many Washingtons. 

I commenced this Address, my friends, with a mem- 
orable saying of a distinguished British statesman in 
his dialogue with Quincy. Let me conclude it by a no 
less memorable and far more discriminating utterance 
from a young and gallant French soldier, — the Marquis 
de Chastellux, — who served so bravely with our army 
of Independence for two years, — a grandson of the great 
Chancellor D'Aguesseau, — to whom Washington paid 
the tribute, so unusual with him, of saying in a letter of 
farewell, " I can truly say, that never in my life have I 
parted with a man, to whom my soul clave more sincerely 
than it did to you," — to whom he paid the still more 



54. 

unusual and unique tribute of writing- a humorous letter 
to him on occasion of his marriage six years afterwards. 
I wish I had time to make a parenthesis here and read 
you a part of this letter ; a very funny one it is. and 
exhibits Washington most gracefully and felicitously 
unbending from his constitutional and habitual grav- 
ity ; — ^but you will find it in the admirable collection of 
Dr. Sparks. 

This gallant soldier of France, as you may all remem- 
ber, wrote an account of his travels in America, which 
has been published both in French and in English in two 
octavo volumes. In one of these volumes, he included, 
also, a letter of his own, addressed " To Mr. Madison, 
Professor of Philosophy in the University of ^yilliams- 
burgh," (Virginia.) a friend and near relative, I believe, of 
the illustrious James Madison. The letter was dated on 
board the Frigate L Emeraude, in the Bay of Chesa- 
peake, on the l'-2th of January. 17§3« and contained the 
following remarkable, and I had almost said exquisite, 
passage : — 

•• Henceforward, Sir, let us enlarge our views ; the 
Fine Arts are adapted to America: They have already 
made some progress there, they will eventually make 
much greater ; no obstacle, no reasonable objection can 
stop them in their career ; these are points at least on 
which we are agreed. Let us now see to what purposes 
they may be converted by the public, the State, and the 
government. Here a vast field opens to our speculation, 
but as it is exposed to every eye, I shall fix mine on the 
object with which it has been most forcibly struck. 
Recollect, Sir, what I have said above, relatiye to officers 



55 

and public dignities. I have remarked tliat a jealousy, 
possibly well founded in itself, but pushed to the extreme, 
had made honors too rare, and rew^'irds too moderate 
amongst you. Call in the Fine Arts to the aid of a 
timid legislation ; the latter confers neither rank, nor 
permanent distinction ; let her bestow statues, monn- 
ments, and medals. Astonished Europe, in admiring a 
Washington, a Warren, a Green, and a Montgomery, 
demands what recompense can repay their services ; 
behold that recompense, worthy of them and of you. 
Let all the great towns in America present statues of 
Washington with this inscription : — Pater, Libera- 
tor, Defensor Patri.e ; let us see, also, those of Han- 
cock and of Adams, with only two words, Primi Pro- 
scripti ; that of Franklin, with the Latin verse inscribed 
in France below his portrait — ■{Eripiilt coelo fnlmcn^ 
scej)trumque t>/rannis). — What glory would not this reflect 
upon America! It would be found that she has already 
more heroes than she could procure marble and artists, — 
and your public Halls, your Curice^ why should they not 
offer in relief and paintings, the battles of Bunker's Hill, 
of Saratoga, of Trenton, of Princeton, of Monmouth, of 
Cowpens, of Eutaw Springs. Thus would you perpetu- 
ate the memory of these glorious deeds ; thus would you 
maintain even through a long peace, that national pride, 
so necessary to the preservation of liberty ; and you 
might, without alarming even that liberty, lavish rewards 
equal to the sacrifices she has received." 

The gallant Marquis did not live to see any part of his 
suggestion accomplished. Our country was not in a con- 
dition, at that periotl of its history, to spare any of its 



56 

time or its means for the commemoration of its lieroes or 
patriots. Boston did, indeed, as early as 1790, set up on 
Beacon Hill a simple Doric colunm, surmounted by our 
then newly adopted national emblem — the Eagle — in 
commemoration of the adoption of the Constitution of 
the United States and of the great Revolutionary events 
by which it was preceded. But Beacon Hill itself was 
long ago removed into the midst of the sea, and the 
shaft reduced to its original elements of brick and stone. 
The old tablets, however, are still to be seen in the 
Doric Hall of the State House, and I have sometimes 
wished that the whole column might be set up again, in 
its primal proportions and simplicity, peering above trees 
and flagstaff', on the highest elevation of Boston Com- 
mon, with the original tablets in its pedestal. 

But the memorials of that day were few and economi- 
cal. Nor can I regret that such honors were not awarded 
to livinof men, however illustrious. It is time enough for 
such distinctions, when death has closed the account and 
set his seal upon the record, and when tlie judgment of 
posterity has confirmed the impressions and ratified the 
decrees of contemporaries. It is rash to accept the ap- 
plauses of the hour for the verdict of history. It is 
dangerous to pronounce upon the ultimate merits of a 
whole life, from the brilliancy of its opening, or even from 
the steadier lustre of its middle passages. Had their 
daring and chivalrous exploits during the early stages 
of the Revolution been crowned with such rewards, Ben- 
edict Arnold and Aaron Burr would have had statues 
in all our streets, — to be hurled from their pedestals 
long before this time, — ^dashed into pieces and crumbled 



57 

into powder beneath tlie feet ot" ti betrayed and out- 
raged people ! 

But there is no h)noer any fear in coniniemorating, by 
suitable and proportionate rnonunients, the truly great men 
of the Colonial or of the Revolutionary period. Their 
fame is beyond the reach of accident, and their forms 
may well be seen decorating our halls and squares. The 
work has been auspiciously commenced. The wish of 
the Marquis de Chastellux is in process of being accom- 
plished. The great chapters of our history may be read 
on the walls of our National Capitol, and even his own 
portrait is not wanting to at least one of the groups. 
Franklin may be seen, in marble or in bronze, in the cities 
of his burial and of his birth. Warren is on Bunker Hill. 
James Otis is at Mount Auburn, and Adams will soon be 
there with him. While there is scarce a city in our land, 
in which the peerless presence of the transcendent Wash- 
ington — Pater ^ Liberator^ Defensor Patrice — may not be 
hailed upon the canvas or in sculpture. The exquisite 
portrait statue by Houdon came first, and nothing will ever 
surpass, or equal it, in interest or in beauty. But the an- 
cient and illustrious State of Virginia has now worthily 
set the example of a more elaborate and composite memo- 
rial, — no huge unmeaning pile of stone, exhibiting nothing 
but the fidelity of the commonest mechanic art, — no gro- 
tesque combination of allegorical and exaggerated shapes, 
— but a glorious group of her own sainted sons, Henry 
and Jefferson, Nelson and Lee, Mason and Marshall, as 
they stood proudly and loyally and lovingly in life, cluster- 
ing around him who was ever above them all, and chal- 
lenging, alike for him uiul for themselves, the affectionate 



58 

remembrance ot a grateful posterity ! Coming from the 
hands of an American artist of the highest genius, and 
whose early loss the country and the world have not yet 
ceased to deplore, — it has every title to the admiration of 
all who shall be privileged to behold it. I have just re- 
turned from seeing it for the first time, and no one can 
leave it without the reflection, that the great mission of 
American Art has here at least been successfully exempli- 
fied — to adorn the State, to exalt the Commonwealth, to 
illustrate its history, and to perpetuate, for the admiration 
and emulation of mankind, the memories of those match- 
less men, by whom the union and liberty and independ- 
ence of our country were so nobly established and de- 
fended. 

And now the artists of Boston, — incited by the 
spirited and admirable design of a most meritorious 
brother artist, — have appealed to us to aid them in plac- 
ing Massachusetts by the side of Virginia in this precise 
mode of connnemorating the Father of his Country. I 
rejoice that our native artists have thus spoken out, united- 
ly ajid earnestly, for themselves, and I trust and believe 
that their appeal will meet with a cordial and generous 
response. I do not forget that other and excellent de- 
signs for a similar work have recently been produced, — ■ 
one by Mr. Ball Hughes, who has so long resided in our 
neighborhood, and another by our own Richard Green- 
ough, lately residing in Paris, and just returned to his 
native country. I trust that both of them will be called 
for and cast, somewhere or other, at no distant day. 
Philadelphia cannot do better than adopt one of them ; 
while the otlier may well be taken, in due time, to decorate 



59 

those consecrated grounds at Mount Vernon, wliicli the 
efforts of American ladies, aided and inspired by the elo- 
quence of our incomparable Everett, will soon have re- 
deemed from all j)roj)rietorship less comprehensive than 
that of the whole people of the Union. 

Yet, my friends, the end of my Address must not forget 
its beginning. We may go too far, we may go too fast, 
in these memorials. We may exhaust upon single works 
and single subjects all that art can rightfully claim from a 
wdiole generation. We may bestow upon monuments and 
memorials that which is wanted, that which is needed, for 
the relief of the destitute, for the education of the young, 
or for the institutions of religion and the worship of God. 
We must not forget that the soul of the humblest livino;- 
man is of more worth, than the dust of the mightiest 
dead that e\'er trod the ways of glory or sounded all the 
depths and shoals of honor. State Statues, merely, will 
not sustain and shore up these cherished institutions of free- 
dom. Graven images, even of our most saintly iieroes, 
are but a poor substitute for the worship of that Almighty 
Being to whom w^e owe it, that our horse and his rider, 
instead of being thrown into the sea like those of Egypt 
of old, have become associated forever with the most 
glorious triumphs of Liberty. We must not rob our 
charities, or starve our churches, to decorate our squares 
or even to magnify our benefactors, — and fortunate, for- 
tunate is it, wdien both objects can be worthily blended, as 
in the Memorial Church of the Puritans in London, for 
which an eloquent English voice is at this moment 
pleading among us. But no such considerations are in- 
volved in this design. It is one which contemplates no 



60 

extravagant or disproportionate outlay. A single Fair, 
in this very Hall, — like that which finished the monument 
on Bunker Hill, or endowed the Asylum for the Blind, 
or relieved the treasury of the Boston Provident Associa- 
tion at a moment of its utmost need, or more recently 
assured the erection of a Hospital for Incurables, 
under the auspices of ladies like those I see before 
me, — will accomplish the entire work. And it will be 
accomplished. The artists and the lovers of art, in our 
city, have pronounced the imperative decree, that this 
admirable design of Washington, — as he mounted his 
charger under the Old Cambridge elm on the Sd of 
July, 177"^5 to take command, for the first time, of an 
American army for the relief of Boston, — or as he stood 
on yonder heights and witnessed his first great victory, 
while the British fleet and the British forces sailed out 
of our harbor on the 17th of March, 177^: — ^^r as he 
reined up in yonder street to receive the homage of every 
true Boston heart, as First President of the United 
States, on the 24th day of October, 17^9, — that this 
design shall no longer remain in precarious, perishable 
plaster, but shall assume a form as durable as our grati- 
tude or his own fame. And to that decree, as well as 
to this Address, I feel assured that all who hear me will 
give a hearty and unanimous Amen ! 



-=^1 



APPENDIX. 



Rp:solved, that this Committee gratefully acknowledge the generosity 
of the Honorable Robert C. Wintiirop, in complying with their invi- 
tation to deliver his admirable address upon " The Fine Arts and tiieir 
relation to Historical Monuments," in aid of the erection in Boston of 
Ball's Equestrian Statue of Washington, and that they return to him 
their sincere thanks for his service, with the assurance, that among the 
pleasing associations which will accompany the undertaking, none will be 
more encouraging than the interest which he so promptly and so accept- 
ably manifested. 

Thomas Russell. Alex. H. Rice. 

Benjamin Ciiampney. F. H. Underwood. 

John D. W. Joy. Geo. H, Chickering. 

Warren Sawyer, S. E. Guild. 

Hammatt Billings. Ciias. G. Loring, Jr. 



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